Kelly and Pablo in Madrid: Her Birth Story

It all started one dark and stormy night...... well not really...... but it was Halloween when the contraction started! I really had no idea if they were real contractions or braxton hicks because they weren't really painful, more like period cramps. By 9pm I started keeping track and realized they were 5 minutes apart for hours. I went to bed and ended up staying up the most part of the night with pain but still not too bad. In the morning the contractions were still there but not as frequent but they became more painful. I ended up staying in bed all morning resting and wondering if we should go to the hospital or not. By 1 pm I got up and started doing things around the house and realized when I had a contractions I had some leaking and figured it was my waters. I wasn't really sure because it wasn't like the movies and a big gush of water, it was a slow leak. Since we had no idea if this was it I decided we should go to the hospital and have the professionals tell me what was happening. We packed up our bags, organized some things and headed out. We went to the emergency room and got checked out. A women checked me and either broke my water or said my water was broken and said I am now admitted. I did another set of monitors and got hooked up to an iv and then sent up to maternity and my room. The nurse said I wasn't ready yet and would return when I was. We didn't know what this meant so I sat in the room with contractions for a couple hours. They proceeded to get worse and worse and really painful. I was told I couldn't get any drugs until they were 2-3 minutes apart for an hour. I almost died hearing this. Finally I made it to that point and I was sent down to get my epidural. The nurses were really nice and asked where I was from and I said Seattle, like Grey's Anatomy. They asked me if I knew Dr. Shepard and if the hospital was real. I said no and that it was really filmed in Hollywood. It was pretty entertaining.
After my epidural was in place and I finished bonding with the nurses I headed back up to my room to wait. I still had no idea how much I was dilated because no one ever told me and finally the doctor came in and said I was 3-4 cm dilated. I was shocked! ONLY! I had been there for hours and in a lot of pain and I only made it that far! I was hooked up to oxytocin to help dialate me and sat there and waited. In the mean time my left leg became almost completly numb and that was horrible. A couple hours later they came back in to check and still at 4 cm. Again, shocked and worried they would end up doing a c-section. This process takes forever! So they upped the drugs and I waited more and more.
So to make a long story short, we arrived to the hospital around 3 pm and by the time I reached 10 cm it was 2 am. They took us down to the operating room and I was hoisted on the table, very difficult with a numb leg, and waited for my doctor to arrive and then it was time to push. It was weird to push since I couldn't feel much. I could feel when the contractions arrived but they weren't very painful. I think I did less than 10 pushes but I had to have the help of the a vacuum and my doctor pushing on my stomach, which hurt the most of all. Pablo was not allowed in until her head was out and he was super nervous waiting outside hearing the doctor keep telling me to push. He thought they forgot about him. We figured that because they used the vacuum was the reason he wasn't allowed in. If there are any problems or a c-section fathers are not allowed in. But he came in and the rest was a blur. They told me to watch her come out and then she was placed on me and there she was our Gabriela was here at 2:35 am.
Here they do two hours of skin to skin so she was with me for the next two hours before they cleaned her, weighed her or did anything. We enjoyed our bonding time in our room and notifying all our friends and family.
Overall, I had a pretty good labor and delivery, no major issues and nothing very dramatic. I was very lucky. And besides the lady in the ER when we first arrived to the hospital, everyone was very friendly and patient with me and my language barrier. It was one of my biggest fears.
Gabriela was 9 days early so I wasn't completely prepared but it worked out in the end. My mom arrived the day we were released from the hospital and so we went to pick her up with one extra person!